THE END NIGH IS
Just 21,000 watched Dublin play Meath on Sunday. It’s clear the provincial championships have had their day and it’s time to move on
IT WAS only eight years ago, but right now it might qualify as the good old days. When Dublin and Meath met in the 2016 Leinster semifinal, horror was expressed at the official attendance of 42,259 at Croke Park, to the point that it invited a trawl through the ledgers which only raised the sense of alarm.
It turned out that it had been the lowest attendance for the fixture since 1983; a period when the country was gripped by such a deep economic depression that the only place where the numbers were up was on the ferry crossings as people left in their droves.
But times are relative and what was shocking about that figure — apart from the fact that it was part of a double-header that featured Westmeath-Kildare on the undercard — is that four years earlier Dublin and Meath had attracted 70,000 through the turnstiles.
On Sunday, the latest measure of a rivalry whose pulse slowed down a long time ago was to be found by dividing the attendance of six years ago by two, to give you the 21,445 that sat through the tedium.
Going, going…. the only question that remains is when will this farce be gone?
It is rare in sport that the frustrations of both victors and vanquished are shared. After his team’s 16-point defeat, Colm O’Rourke labelled the Leinster Championship ‘a shambles’ while Dublin boss Dessie Farrell admitted he was ‘blue in the face’ from calling for reform.
If the political powers-that-be have their way, the likelihood is that Farrell will not need any face paint when he vacates his place in the Dublin dug-out for a position in the paying seats some time in the future.
Earlier this month, Derek Kent, Leinster Council chairman claimed that a provincial championship which Dublin will win for a 19th time in 20 years next month, was ‘alive and kicking’.
Back in January, the Leinster CEO Michael Reynolds noted in his annual report that ‘the present structure for the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship may not be pleasing to all.
‘That said and in the context of endeavouring to “save a week” it may be worth considering for the Sam Maguire, the four provincial winners qualify directly for the quarter-finals while the remaining 12 are grouped into four groups of three with the four group winners qualifying for the quarter-finals.’
The likelihood is that — and it echoed an identical proposal from Connacht chief John Prenty — far from trying to ‘save a week’, saving the future of the provincial championships by bumping up the rewards for the winners is what really engaged the Leinster official.
With a review of the new All-Ireland SFC format secluded for the next year, after completion of its third season, it is likely that the provincial lobby will see the provincial championships beefed up to something more substantial than merely offering the winners an opening round home game and its finalists — irrespective of Allianz League status — a guaranteed place in the Sam Maguire Cup series. And it may use the continued decline of attendances as one of the consequences for diluting the link between the provincial competitions and the All-Ireland series. However, that is something that must meet resistance from those who have the interests of the game at heart rather than the preservation of the province’s political interests. This has to be seen as the beginning of the end for the provincial championships — a system so imbalanced, unfair and flawed that for almost quarter of a century, the GAA has busied itself seeking to address the fall-out with the introduction of qualifiers, Super 8s, and the current format that incorporates two-tiered national championships. The Leinster and Munster championships have become the poster boys for the dysfunctionality of the provincial championships but it goes deeper than that.
In his role as an RTÉ pundit on Sunday night, Seán Cavanagh was half right when he suggested that the Leinster Championship would be an open and competitive competition if Dublin were not in it.
But if that was the case it would also be one of the weakest, made up in the main of lower league teams.
If Kildare fail to make it past Louth to reach the Leinster final, exactly half of the 16 teams in this year’s Tailteann Cup will be made up of Leinster counties.
That can be taken as a measure of the quality of the Leinster Championship.
It is even possible to put a number of sorts on the relative strengths of all four provinces based on this year’s National League positions, by giving Division 1 winners Derry 32 points all the way down to Waterford on one point at the bottom of Division 4.
When those points are applied (divided by the number of teams in each province) the relative average strength of the four provinces has Ulster at the top with 22.3, followed by Connacht (17.3), Leinster (13.4) and Munster (12.3).
Put plainly, Ulster is twice as strong as Leinster and Munster, so how can provincial success ever be the basis for fast-tracking teams deep into the All-Ireland series?
And what the exercise also illustrates is that Ulster is not the strongest Championship because of something that is in the water up there but because of the strength of its teams – underlined by the fact that Fermanagh and Antrim will be the only two of the northern province’s counties operating outside Divisions 1 and 2 next spring.
In sticking by the age-old belief that geography trumps merit, the GAA continues to sell football hopelessly short.
A football championship based on the merit of achieved league status is surely the only way forward.
And that means not just playing the provincial championships at the start of the year, but completely decoupling them from the All-Ireland series.
That would mean a new central funding mechanism to sustain the invaluable work on the ground overseen by the provincial councils but the latter can never be the basis for retaining a format that is obviously not working.
There is a better way, as the hurling championship will show in the coming weeks, where teams of equal ability go head to head.
Instead, football is left limping behind with a competition which imprisons many of its teams and limits all of the potential that a league-based Championship would release.
Now that people are turning their backs and their wallets on it, it is time to leave the provincial championships where they belong.
In the past.